After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, perhaps the most successful internet influencer from China on YouTube, is suddenly posting videos again.
Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, who is best known for sharing soothing, carefully edited clips of herself cooking traditional Chinese dishes, farming and working on elaborate art projects, posted three new videos of her rural lifestyle on all its social media channels.
In two of them, as always, she makes by hand a beautifully carved lacquer cabinet and a woodshed for storing clothes. In the third clip she spins, dyes and weaves silk. In less than a day, the videos received almost 15 million cumulative views on YouTube. “When the world needed her most, she returned,” reads the top comment on one of the clips.
Li, whose original name is Li Jiajia, is from a mountainous city in China's southwestern Sichuan province and first started posting cooking videos online under the name Li Ziqi around 2016. Her content often features her doing things such as peacefully hanging persimmons to dry in the sun, carefully arranging flower arrangements, and riding horses through a misty forest, all without the presence of cell phones or other modern technology.
The slow pace, soothing music and impeccable cinematography of her videos quickly made her a social media star around the world. Fans loved the idealized version of rural life that Li presented, although some viewers criticized it as overly sanitized. She has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube, which is blocked in China, and 53 million followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, making her one of the few Chinese content creators who are influential both on the Chinese internet and abroad. In 2020, The New York Times called Li a “Quarantine Queen.”
As her videos became more popular, Li became a kind of unofficial cultural ambassador for China, educating her Western audiences about traditional forms of Chinese art and cooking without ever mentioning political or human rights issues. Her videos extolling the ideals of a slower, pastoral lifestyle also fit well with the government's rural revitalization agenda. Her hiatus from the Internet has, in a sense, unintentionally damaged China's image abroad as a whole.
“Li's personal decision to return to her home village and her choice to transform her new life into video content were exploited to support the official policy of revitalizing China's withering rural communities and the values of economic neoliberalism, as her own to promote entrepreneurship and personal responsibility. Rui Kunze, a research fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote in a 2024 article analyzing the rise of Li Ziqi.
